Imagio Dei: Beyond Fig Leaves

I’ve spent this week trying to wrap my mind around the total image of God – the one that incorporates the descriptors “male” and “female.” Discussions at lunch and in class have been intense, but not heated or adversarial. It’s interesting to sit in a class with men and women who are all committed to living out their Call in Christ, but who are not in agreement with how this “image” should be known.

The deeper I delve into this, I am grasping a greater and greater picture of God. Beyond my experience, knowlege or comprehension, God is, was, will be. Greater than any point OF God’s Creation or IN God’s Creation, God is. Trying to explain God’s “maleness” and “femaleness” without creating a new heresy (or an old one) is a bit of a challenge!

So when I get home at the end of the week, why would this matter?? Several reasons:

Because of those who “rank order” gender as a means of restricting ministry and vocation
Because of the place and time I find myself as a woman and a pastor
Because of the way that I view the Bible and attempt to bring a “total picture” of God to the forefront as I preach
Because of the people I teach and prepare to be leaders in the church
Because I can no more explain this than the last theologian who attempted it… and so there’s a great sense of maintaining humility and dependence on God in the first place.

And there’s the total “brain dump” of what I have left after another eight hours of class…